Hamby Broke the Mold

The state of Oregon and the city of Hillsboro lost a good friend and leader last week with the death of Jeannette Hamby. She’ll be widely remembered as a five-term legislator who launched her career in an age of Oregon politics when women weren’t expected to be involved in governance.

But before being elected to the legislature, Hamby broke ground here in Hillsboro by being the first woman elected to the Hillsboro Union High School Board. That was 1971 and, for those who remember, it was more than “a crack in the glass ceiling.” It was groundbreaking and Hamby brought issues to the forefront that both changed how we live in Washington County and helped to preserve the rural, beautiful land on which we live.

Hamby was a champion for women and for justice for the immigrant population in the state — at the time, mostly migrant farmworker families from Mexico. This was a time when it was not uncommon to see storefronts in not-so-rural parts of the county with signs stating, “No Mexicans allowed.” And the camps the migrant families lived in were sometimes guarded by gun-toting thugs — meant to keep the workers in as much as to keep teachers and church workers out.

A liberal, free spending Democrat? No. Hamby was a Republican, a self-proclaimed progressive Republican, who lived by the principles of her party and with the wisdom and compassion learned from her own life experiences. She was a person of integrity who was in elected state service for 17 years. She was noted for being broad-minded, hard working, and for working across party lines to achieve the common good.

It is with sorrow that we bid her farewell one last time. But it seems somehow part of her impeccable timing that we do so in the week the Oregon Legislature opens its spring assembly. And the issues our legislators will take up would be so familiar to Jeannette Hamby: Health care of decent quality and affordable to all; education that begins pre-K and prepares our kids through college to take up their rightful place in living and building the American Dream; how to finance rural counties using the natural resources of our beautiful land (read “forestry”) while at the same time preserving those resources for future generations; and how to grow an economy with jobs that provide parents the means to feed, clothe, house and educate their families with dignity.

As the Hamby family puts Jeannette to rest, our Legislature would do well to be guided by her courage, wisdom and spirit of open, bipartisan governance. (tm)